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August 29, 2007
The Shirley Basseyness Of Butch.
Oh my christened niece, there was an advert for a Christmas Club on cable last night.
"Spread the cost of having the best Christmas ever."
August 29th, this is. Synchronicity, because in an article for The Times a while ago I wrote that the best Christmas I ever had was one I spent alone cooking-along-a-Delia-and-Nigella and reading Rumpole for the first time, and over the Bank Holiday weekend just gone I read She and found the source for Rumpole referring to Hilda as She Who Must Be Obeyed!
And there’s more…
She Who Must Be Obeyed says, “(But) that is the fashion of these savages who lack imagination and fly to the beasts they resemble for a name", which made me think of director Neale "I Don't Care That You Got A Standing Ovation, You Were God Awful" Simpson forbidding me to use comparisons when I wrote the brochure copy for Ballet Star Galactica.
“Big whoop de doo they’re from Audience Survey Forms so you’re not making them up. You’re not using “Like a terpsichorean Pam Ayres on acid” or anything shitly like it, and that’s that.”
Neale is too big in TV to bother with poor little me any more. So I can use Audience Survey Form comparisons and he won’t know. “Must be the result of a drunken one-night stand between Tommy Cooper and Margot Fonteyn” being the most useful ever. I fed it in a press release to journalists in the North and the Liverpool Post reviewer was good enough to use it in a quote. It’s in my CV now.
I love audience survey forms. People are asked to write down suggestions for future performances (doing National Rural Touring Scheme gigs in Hampshire, Gloucestershire and Oxfordshire I get umpteen requests for The Old Rugged Cross, jingoism and the reinstatement of capital punishment) and to comment on the present one.
I’ve had:
“Exactly the right size for the venue”.
“I’ll make all my mates come and see him at his next gig in Brecon. Fabulous. We didn’t know what it was at first, and I was the one drew the short straw who had to come and watch to find out. All the rest of them looked at the flyer and thought who wants to go and see that fat poof?”
“We couldn’t decide if he looked more like the man who does the china on the Antiques Road Show that isn’t either someone’s father or son also on the programme – possibly dead? - or Anne Widdecombe.”
Luke Jennings writing in The Guardian recently compared Bolshoi principal Nikolai Tsiskaridze to Shirley Bassey, pointing up the way Tsiskaridze clutched at an imaginary string of pearls.
And I was wafted – poof! - back to my early twenties playing Captain Petrovich in Eugene Onegin with British Youth Opera.
The great bass Robert Lloyd, President of BYO, prophesied,
“You will perform the roles after which you most hanker”.
Which put the kaibosh on the male operatic roles as far as I was concerned. Dull buggers. I hankered to play Odette/Odile, Giselle, Aurora and Nikya. Notice that the Sugar Plum Fairy isn’t on the list. I hate it. Well, the moment she gets out of that boat on the Rose Hip River we’re off on the wrong tack. (See what I did there?) All those high flutes meant to be supporting the trickiest choreography? My juices just don’t flow when all I’ve got under my big entrance is flutter-tongue.
Now, I’m a slow penny-drop performer. Ask Jamie Hayes, who directed Thieving Magpie in the same season as the run of Eugene Onegin.
“Iestyn’s a slow penny-drop performer”, I overheard him telling an exasperated stage manager. “He gets that look on his face of someone sitting in the dentist’s chair trying to pretend they’re not afraid of the drill, and it means he’s taking it on board. I’ve learned to wait and then he’ll show me that’s he got it. Be patient.”
Bless Jamie. He later thought of me for the role of Albert in Albert Herring.
“Vocally, you’d have been perfect, I thought. (I’d have worried about the hiccup written on the top C Flat, myself.) But portraying innocence? No. Having been round the block a few times tart with a heart sort of thing could have been written for you. But unsullied? I didn’t think you’d get that quality into your portrayal.”
I never got Captain Petrovich in Eugene Onegin. Mainly because of the dancing. I had to waltz to Tchaikovsky and look military. All the other times I’ve waltzed to Tchaikovsky I’ve had to look Lilacy, Swan Queeny or Sugar Plummy. (I know. But Christmas corporates…) Even the Tony Award winning choreographer Terry John Bates couldn’t get me to look military. Though he had a good bloody go.
“Stand in a strong position.
‘No.
‘No.
‘No.
‘No.
‘No.
‘No.
‘No.
‘No.
‘Nearly…
…no.”
“Hand upturned and arm straight when you waltz, how many more times? You’re showing that you’re a sex-on-legs killing-machine, you’re not simpering under your right wing while the Prince has it out with the Muppet owl thing in the upstage right corner.”
“Don’t clutch at the collar of your uniform like that. If you’re going for hand over heart Russian formal, then it’s flat and strong with the hand. What you’re doing looks like a hyphenated hag from the Cotswolds clutching at her pearls.”
See? It happens to the best of us.
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